I met a good old friend in Bacolod City, Negros Occidental during a business trip in May 2016. While he is not the touristy type, he still offered to drive us around to enjoy Bacolod City at the street level.

The one thing he emphasized was that one has never really been to Bacolod City if one hasn't tried eating breakfast at one of the city's native coffee shops. And no he wasn't referring to homegrown coffee shops in the malls or the ones with air conditioning, glass walls and doors, and ridiculously priced coffee. In Cebu or Bohol, this would be called painitan. The one we went to was called GL Cafe.

GL Cafe in Bacolod City, Negros Occidental, Philippines

GL Cafe in Bacolod City, Negros Occidental, Philippines

The concept of the native Negrense coffee shop was simple: prepare coffee the traditional way, serve breakfast items and it is in business. Several mountain towns in Negros Occidental such as Candoni, Canlaon, and Don Salvador Benedicto have some coffee plantations and this is where most of the supply in Negros Occidental come from. Most coffee crops in the province are of the organic robusta variety from Vietnam. The traditional way of preparing coffee is to boil the ground beans in water then sift it using katya or cheesecloth. Hardcore coffee lovers would love the earthly flavor or Negrense coffee. Instead of cream, they pour in condensed milk on your cup of coffee. But the best thing about it is that a cup of traditionally prepared, native Negrense coffee only costs PhP 13.00 at GL Cafe.

Condensed milk poured into a cup of coffee

We initially wanted to order the Pakalog breakfast: pan de sal, kape, and itlog, a word play of the more popular tapsilog (tapa, sinangag, and itlog). But we ended up ordering a lot more. For the total of PhP 550 bill that we paid, we already had several cups of coffee, calamansi juice, tea, lots of pan de sal, corned beef, pancit canton, sunny side up eggs, scrambled eggs, and instant noodles. And it fed all four big manly appetites.